Do you want them here? I don’t. I don’t tell a soul about lemmy, because this is place for me to get away from them. A place for mostly rational discussion, populated by people free thinking enough to seek an alternative. If the masses descended on Lemmy, they’d ruin it like they ruin everything else. They’d draw the attention that would lead to it being litigated, regulated, purchased, corporatized etc. Let them stay on Facebook and Reddit.
Edit: ITT: A bunch of people who haven’t paid attention to how mind bendingly stupid content has become on mainstream social media, or worse yet, actually enjoy the chum pumped out by Facebook and TikTok and want it to come to lemmy as well. I’ll wear my downvotes with pride.
The current US administration and its demagogues and lackeys have been doing all sorts of things they shouldn’t be able to do in a normal society. You’d be amazed at how quickly they’d be able to shut down a form of mass media they can’t control.
It’s fine if you don’t like my mentality. I’m highly selective about who I let into to my day to day life in meatspace. I like small gatherings, and keep a high bar for who I want to associate with. I don’t see why I shouldn’t apply the same principle to my internet life.
Literally the opposite. What are they gonna do? A cyberattack against an instance hosted in Europe? That’s an act of war
People follow the crowd and centralized media had considerably bigger crowds
Several of these platforms used bots and/or multiple staff accounts to inflate user count/engagement to draw more people in and trigger the network effect.
- Ease of use
The combination of having to choose an instance and then start with an algorithm free blank slate is a tough ask. It literally takes time to sit down and setup your initial “feed”, which is probably a good thing, but not at all what attracts users whimsical curiosities nor what they’ve experienced over their entire existence with social media.
I just browse All. Zero setup beyond picking my instance.
Centralized social media is where their friends are.
convenience, marketing
Have you invited people to the fediverse?
Yep I literally didn’t hear about it till last week
Cool
How is it?I love it! It’s like reddit was years ago, its positive, friendly and it’s got a nice community feel. Has it changed much in the time you’ve been here?
Ease of access and user experience. A single platform beats that, as you don’t have to choose where to signup and everything will be available without effort.
However, Lemmy is getting better with that and hopefully the user base continues growing. It doesn’t need to have a billion users to be an awesome experience.
Plus it’s not easy to explain. Instagram is for pictures and reels Facebook is for people you know IRL Twitter* is for short sentences you spit out Lemmy… well it’s a collection of lots of different instances and then you’ve got communities on each one and some are duplicated but you can join them anyway etc etc
- I refuse to say X cos its wanky
Part of it is just the network effect. If the people they want to follow are on twitter then they do not really have a choice. Also part of it is the algorithms. For some needing to manually select communities or individuals is an inconvenience. Finally I feel like fedi communities have a very distinct atmosphere simply because very few people use it. This can all change in the future but the majority of the issues stem from just not having enough creators and users as well as the additional effort required to use these platforms.
Is mastodon the app that has it? I’m still pretty new to knowing wtf it even is
Ok so are there any specific apps for the fediverse?
Thank you
Network effect. Next question.
If people hate fruit on pizza, why is tomato sauce okay?
Olives and peppers are also fine. It’s just pineapple that’s as bad as putting a picture of the Pope in your toilet.
Because of network effects.
Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don’t have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don’t have a user base.
It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.
The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.
I’d also chalk it up to convenience.
The Fediverse requires effort.
That too.
The Fediverse is a confusing concept. I’m a giant nerd and even I don’t really understand how this is supposed to work. Centralized platforms provide a more straightforward user experience. And as others have said, that’s where the content is right now.
It’s no more confusing than using email, and everybody managed to figure that out. You don’t need to know how the nitty gritty of it works. The network effects is a far bigger issue, as you point out, centralized platforms simply have far more content on them.
It’s far more complicated than email, at least I can send an email to any valid address from any other address by default ( mostly ) - Lemmy / Fediverse is like needing multiple email addresses that each one can only email some of the others, and you might not even get the response someone sent you unless the content is literally carried back to you.
I have multiple accounts on multiple instances, and sometimes I come across posts I read with one account, but my comments or the responses to those comments just aren’t there, so you only get a portion of what is out there.
It’s kinda a terrible experience in that way.
The whole point of ActivityPub is that you don’t need multiple accounts on different servers. You can use your Lemmy account to talk to people on Mastodon, browse PixelFed, watch PeerTube. Yes, there is sometimes lag in content propagating, and so on, but it’s clearly not a show stopper. My experience using Lemmy and Mastodon is the opposite of terrible.
You don’t get me. My instance isn’t Federated with lemmy.world and other large instances. I just don’t see the majority of comments or content you do on this account.
And I don’t see that as a problem. I don’t think Fediverse needs to be fully connected the way a centralized platform is. The fact that different instances can choose whom they federate with is a feature not a bug. Fediverse favors creating smaller communities that are more personal, instead of just being one giant cesspool. It’s a different way to interact with people.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.
I don’t think the average user thinks much about the platform they’re on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.
Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren’t really - you’d have to actively go search for them. People just aren’t likely to do that, I don’t think.
Most people are like sheep and just follow the herd.
All but you always get those people that swear they’re different.
